“They didn’t mean—” began Gerry.
But Mona’s angry protestations, and Rene’s tears, and Gerry’s beseechments were of little avail. As for Betty, she stood by feeling even more useless than the rest.
For it was evident that these were a party of proud and respectable working-people who had been wounded in their most vulnerable part by Mona’s and Rene’s suspicious-sounding inquiries. The burden of the older man’s speech was the same as that of his son’s. If they were accused of stealing silver cups by young ladies who had evidently come out on purpose of tracking, well, they would turn round and go straight back to the Woodhurst Police Station, taking the young ladies in tow! “To show as we’re fair and square and honest, and that the police there knows us fine and treats us civil,” repeated the man. “Not to say that the Weyhurst police knows us too, where we comes from!”
“‘Weyhurst!’” repeated Betty in a surprised squeak.
For Weyhurst was the town where she lived.
“‘Weyhurst!’ I ses and means,” said the older man severely, evidently scenting further suspicions in Betty’s surprised squeak. “They knows me fair and square there, from Weyhurst. And if we’s being tracked, I’ll show every one of you, down Woodhurst here, w’ere we passed through this morning, and was treated civil by the police, whether Andrew Grimes—licensed travelling broom-seller—ain’t respected by all atween Weyhurst and Woodhurst, him an’ his wife Anna Grimes too, wot is travelling in this here caravan at this very minute.”
The said Anna Grimes put a tidy head through the caravan door as though to prove the truth of her husband’s remarks. She was a decent middle-aged woman, but her face was set in angry lines.
“An’ as I ses, to be sure,” she broke out, “we’s enough trouble to make an honest living these days without young ladies a-tracking us down, and then going back, perhaps, an’ sending police after us for cups. As I ses—” She broke off suddenly with a cry of surprise. “Dad, who’ve you got ’ere?” she called out in a different voice. “Why——!”
“Why—!” remarked Betty, too, at that instant.
For something in the look of Anna Grimes’s face was familiar, though what the familiarity consisted in she could not for a minute or two find out. The woman’s face was somehow connected in her mind with home; and something unpleasant; and—oh yes, with a baby!